By Idode Oboni
SIR: The publication with the above titled in The Nation, Wednesday March 24 refers. The primary role of the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) is the periodic review and publication of prices of petroleum products. This, the agency does by listing the prevailing market cost elements that constitute the price template of products.
PPPRA sustains this basic responsibility that is unambiguously contained in its organizational name when due. In short, it is still the agency that determines the pricing policy of petroleum products in Nigeria.
On March 27, 2020, the PPPRA in an extraordinary gazette Vol. 107, No. 25 notified the public on a “Market Based Pricing Regime for Premium Motor Spirit Regulation”.
With the gazette, the public was informed that henceforth, the prices of the product would be based on market fundamentals.
While the deregulation opened the import gates for willing marketers to flood their depots and retail outlets with the products, the high exchange rates held them down. This has automatically made the Pipelines Products Marketing Company (PPMC), a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) the only importer in what would have been a competitive market. Throughout the period of COVID-19 lockdown last year, the PMS was pocket friendly due to low crude oil prices. The pump price dipped from N143 per litre to about N125 per litre before rising marginally.
Meanwhile, the agency had managed the market-based regime till when Nigerians cried out as the cost of PMS soared spirally in response to the bullish cost of crude oil, soaring exchange rate and other variables.
As a responsive administration, the federal government could not have left the citizenry to their fate. With a human face, it started selling the product below its cost price while finding a way around (payment of under recovery) the importation since there was no budgetary provision for the payment of its subsidy.
This explanation is germane because the referenced letter misconstrued the removal of subsidy, deregulation and payment of subsidy for stoppage of the statutory publication of pricing template.
The PPPRA’s publication of N212.68 per litre on the website that the writer alluded to was actually a performance of its official role. It did not translate to an automatic adjustment of the pump price. Had the PPPRA wanted to effect a price hike, the government would have had to send a notification memo via the PPMC to the marketers. In February, the agency released its monthly template to stakeholders and there were no hike since there was no memo to that effect. It would be recalled that prior to the publication of the said N212.68 per litre, marketers were already eager to hike the price of the product despite NNPC’s announcement that there would be no price hike in March 2021.
However, the writer refused to see the publication of that template as a performance of a statutory role, hence a refusal to publish the same template an abdication of its primary assignment. This is so because some businessmen search the agency’s website for the same template regularly for their business plan.
The opinion is largely predicated not only on ignorance but also on emotion.
Just as one would not hold a smooth expressway accountable for a fatal road accident, the PPPRA is not to blame in this case. The blame is better directed to the doorstep of greedy petrol marketers that based their upward review on a template that was not addressed to them. It is germane to also ask the marketers how swiftly they responded to the downward review of the petrol pump price when it was reduced from N143 to N125 and even N123.50 per litre last year.
It is a high time the government checkmates marketers’ unbridled appetite for heartless price hike while consumers groan.
Finally, as for the writer’s call for the removal of the Executive Secretary, Abdulkadir Saidu, it is obvious that those behind the publication have a different agenda in mind. When writers are sponsored to blackmail an industrious and result-oriented public servant, it does not delete the facts and figures of his performance.
- Idode Oboni,
Abuja.
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